Donald Trump and his fellow liberals Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are lambasting free trade as the scourge of the American working man. How odd it is that an economic activity so beneficial to almost every American, indeed to the vast majority of the human race, suffers such attacks with only half-hearted defenses raised by politicians who should know better and economists who do know better.

I stipulate: in trade, as in any economic endeavor, there are losers in the short run. Capitalism is, after all, fundamentally a system of creative destruction. But if there is any area of agreement among economists of all political stripes — a group among whom finding agreement is exceptionally difficult given their unique decision-making anatomy — it is that free trade provides large net benefits to the societies that engage in it, even if other nations do not lower trade barriers to the same degree.

Furthermore, the benefits of trade accrue in large measure to the lower economic echelons of society in an extension of Schumpeter’s profound observation that “the capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”

Allow me to offer a few quotes (emphasis added) from one prominent economist, at the time a professor at an elite university, who was lamenting the poor understanding of international trade in the United States:

It was an ugly weekend for Donald Trump — his first in a primary election season that for Republicans has been somewhere between a surprise and an embarrassment. Not only did Ted Cruz win two of Saturday’s four primaries and caucuses, trouncing Trump in Kansas and Maine, but Trump barely beat Cruz in Louisiana and Kentucky. Trump consistently underperformed polls going into the contests.

There was not a great deal of polling for these elections, but here are the results as compared to the RealClearPolitics average of polls in each state, with each candidate’s numbers representing his percentage of the vote received:

Maine (caucus): Cruz 45.9, Trump 32.6, Kasich 12.2, Rubio 8 (Cruz +23 over Trump). There was no poll of this race, but I’d bet money that a poll would not have shown this result, not least because Trump recently received the endorsement of Maine’s Governor Paul Le Page.

Donald Trump’s response was to say he wanted to “take on Ted one on one,” and that Cruz should have done well in Maine because “it’s very close to Canada.” Trump also opined that Cruz cannot win California, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania — which may well be true, at least as long as other non-Trump candidates are in the running — and he called for Marco Rubio to get out of the race.

If anybody has friends in Gilpin County, in the area of Roy's Last Shot, Lump Gulch, Snowline Lake, Gold/Quartz roads, etc., could you please ask them to keep an eye out for our missing dog? Her name is Luna. She's a blue-merle colored corgi with one blue eye and one brown eye. She's extremely friendly. Her tags may be difficult to read. She's about 15 inches long, maybe 10 inches tall, with white on the tip of her tail, and gray/white/tan fur. My e-mail is rossputin(at)rossputin(dot)com

If anybody happens to find her or hear of anybody else finding her, please let us know as soon as possible. She's really part of the family and we're incredibly sad...

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was, after all, a Republican Party event I was speaking at…

I recently had the privilege to be the keynote speaker at the Douglas County (Colorado) Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner. “DougCo,” a large suburban and rural county south of Denver, is, in percentage terms, even more Republican than the famously conservative El Paso County which contains Colorado Springs, Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, and the enormous Fort Carson U.S. Army base.

As someone who values fundamental principles highly (and not because marijuana is legal here), I’m reasonably well known — at least to those who listen to my radio program — for my opposition to the candidacy of Donald Trump. And so I was pleasantly surprised when my request for a show of hands caused but one single arm to go up in support of Mr. Trump. (Perhaps 60 percent of the room supported Ted Cruz and almost all of the rest were for Marco Rubio.)

I continued my remarks, focusing on the tremendous anti-liberty direction our nation has taken in recent years and on the phenomenon that is the rise of Bernie Sanders. I explained that wealth redistribution is theft even if a majority of people vote on it. I pointed out that so many politicians campaign on outcomes rather than principles, and discussed the end-justifies-the-means approach that has long characterized Progressivism and which explains their explicit disdain for the Constitution.

My colleague Scott McKay’s prediction that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will become the Democrats’ white knight after Hillary Clinton’s campaign collapses under the weight of her own misdeeds seems less of a longshot today than just a few weeks ago.

But despite the worsening stream of news — a trickle from the slowly cracking dam of bureaucrats and co-conspirators and media hacks shielding Americans from understanding the fullness of her malfeasance — McKay assumes something I don’t: that an indicted Mrs. Clinton would necessarily be unable to garner or maintain the Democratic nomination.

Elsewhere, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announces that the Garden State will create its own version of Mt. Rushmore – featuring cultural icons Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, J.Lo, and Nicki Minaj. Rather than show the women’s faces, the hill will have carved into it likenesses of their barely-clothed rear ends. “After all,” says National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill, “they’ve proven that only women can be as famous from behind as from in front.” Major funding for the project is received from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

Polling can be and has often been wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, but Trump’s electability gap has been a consistent feature of his primary campaign as a fire-breathing self-funding willing-to-say-anything non-politician politician.

However, even if you believe (as I do) the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is “clearly itching to run against Mr. Trump,” he nevertheless poses a substantial threat to her presidential aspirations in advance of November’s elections.

I'm very happy and proud to let you know that starting Monday, January 4, 2016, I'll be the new host of the morning drive radio show (6 AM to 10 AM, with recorded 5 AM hour) on Denver's Talk Station, TalkRadio 630 KHOW. My good friend Mandy Connell will be taking over on KOA NewsRadio for the semi-retiring Mike Rosen who will continue to have a show on Saturday mornings. So many big changes going on at the radio stations and for me. I hope you'll be a regular listener!

Last week my wife said to me, “I think I’d like to get a gun.” By which she meant a gun she can carry with her. If my wife were from Texas, this might not be surprising. But she is from Australia, a country which for two decades has had restrictive firearms laws and whose citizens largely do not understand Americans’ commitment to protecting gun rights.

She has long been politely but barely tolerant of my interest in guns, of the fact that I have more than a few of them, and of my treating target practice as something important, not simply a sport or hobby — though it is those things as well. She has gone from forbearing to interested, an evolution I never expected to witness.

I asked my wife — now an American citizen — what spurred her interest in something which had previously frightened her. The intensity of her answer, even more than the words themselves, surprised me: “San Bernardino has convinced me that as long as Barack Obama is president, terrorists will be emboldened. And I’m afraid that as long as Barack Obama is president they will have an easier time getting into the country than they should.”

President Obama has spent years trying and failing to jawbone the American people into yet another “fundamental transformation” of the nation, namely to forsake the Second Amendment and to abandon a real, if not equally geographically distributed, “gun culture” — a term which liberals and other foreigners use as a pejorative but which I mean as nothing more than a recognition of a tradition with deep historical, pragmatic and, yes, political roots.

Meanwhile, the most anti-gun president in our nation’s history has created a boom in gun and ammunition sales and a massive bull market in the stock prices of firearms manufacturers.